Chapter 8
eight
. . .
Rhys
The message stays lit on my screen for three seconds too long before I move.
"Get your shoes," I tell Willow. "Now."
She doesn't argue, which tells me she understood the look on my face better than I wanted her to.
I sweep the recipe book and the microdrive into a lockbox from the hall closet, grab my laptop and the go-bag I keep by the stairs, and walk her down to the secure room beneath the cabin—a poured-concrete space disguised as a root cellar, reinforced enough to survive anything short of a direct assault, stocked with enough supplies to outlast a siege.
I built it two years ago for a different job, a different threat.
I never imagined I'd be leading Willow Thompson down these stairs with her father's murder evidence in my hand.
"Stay here," I say, setting her up at the small desk with the laptop, a satellite radio, and a lamp. "I need to make some calls."
"Hudson." Her voice is steady, but her hands are not. "Talk to me. What did that message mean?"
"It means Michaelson has your location. I need to know how he got it." I crouch in front of her so we're eye level. "I'm not shutting you out. I need fifteen minutes to think without watching the door."
She nods, jaw tight, and lets me go.
Upstairs, I open a channel I haven't used since the Michaelson investigation went cold seven months ago—compartmented, routed through three relays, the kind of connection that doesn't show up on any log a compromised agent could pull. Dash answers on the second ring.
"Talk," he says.
"Voss is moving on us. Michaelson knows where I brought her. Somebody gave him this property."
A pause, then Dash's voice drops low. "That's not public information, Wolfe. That's restricted access."
"I know."
"You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"I'm thinking about Route 9," I say, and my stomach turns over just saying it out loud. "I want the extraction file from seven months ago. Every access log, every person who touched that route before it got sold."
"On it. Give me twenty minutes."
Finn and Madelyn are on the line by the time Dash calls back, and I put everything on the screen where all three of them can see it—the original extraction plan for the Thompson family, timestamped, with four names attached to full route access. Myself. Dash. Finn. And Caleb Rourke.
"Pull the cabin's security profile," I say. "Compare access logs."
It takes Dash four minutes to find it. Three weeks ago, a query ran against the property records tied to my personal holdings—an internal search, flagged as routine, buried under a stack of similar administrative pulls that nobody would think twice about.
The kind of search an actual auditor might run.
Except I know for a fact nobody requested an audit of my personal property three weeks ago.
The login credentials belong to Caleb Rourke.
"Son of a bitch," Finn says quietly.
I sit there staring at the screen, and something in my chest goes cold and still in a way that's worse than rage.
Caleb Rourke sat two desks down from me for ten years.
He brought doughnuts on Fridays. He came to Finn's wedding.
He was in the room the night we planned the Thompson extraction, nodding along, asking good questions, acting like a man who gave a damn whether a family of four made it out alive.
He didn't just sell an address seven months ago.
He watched Daniel Thompson's face on a briefing screen, heard me describe a wife and two kids who needed protecting, and then made a phone call that got all three of them killed.
And now he's done it again—queried my private property records, found the cabin, and handed Michaelson exactly what he needs to finish what Voss started on that embankment.
"Wolfe." Dash's voice cuts through whatever black hole I've fallen into. "You still with us?"
"I'm here." My own voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere far away. "I trusted him. Daniel trusted me, and I brought a rat right into the room where we planned to save his family."
"That's not on you," Madelyn says, gentle but firm, the way she talks to people who are about to do something stupid out of guilt. "That's on him."
"It's on both of us." I close the laptop harder than I mean to. "We're coming to you," I tell them. "All three of you. I don't trust any channel that runs through the agency until I know exactly how deep this goes."
"We're already in the truck," Finn says. "Forty minutes out."
I end the call and sit there for a moment in the quiet, feeling the weight of every wrong turn stacking up behind me—the promise I made Daniel, the extraction that never should have failed, and now a corrupt agent circling closer to the one person left alive to pay for it.
When I go back down to the secure room, Willow is sitting exactly where I left her, back straight, hands folded in her lap in a way that means she's holding herself together through sheer will. She looks up when I come down the stairs, and I watch her read my face before I say a single word.
"It's bad," she says. Not a question.
"There's a leak inside my task force. Same person who sold your family's extraction route seven months ago. He's still active. He found this cabin three weeks ago."
Her face goes white, but she doesn't fall apart. "So he's the reason they know I'm alive."
"He's part of it. A photo from the bakery got you flagged. He's the reason they know exactly where to find you now."
She's quiet for a long moment, staring at the concrete wall like she's trying to find something solid to hold onto in it. Then she looks back at me, and there's something in her eyes I haven't seen since the first night I brought her here—not fear. Resolve.
"I'm not staying down here like a piece of evidence in an evidence locker," she says.
"Willow—"
"No." She stands up, and even in an oversized t-shirt with her hair a mess from stress, she manages to look like she means it.
"You don't get to decide I'm something you lock in a room to keep safe.
My father died trying to get this evidence out.
I'm not going to sit in a basement while everyone else decides what happens to it. "
I want to argue. Every protective instinct in me wants to put her behind three feet of concrete and stand in front of the door myself.
But I look at her, at the steel underneath the fear, and I think about Daniel Thompson telling me his daughter would keep something safe without even knowing what it was—and I understand that keeping her safe doesn't mean making her small.
"Okay," I say. "Then you're going to help me."
Something shifts in her expression—surprise, then something steadier.
"The drive," I tell her, "goes in the lockbox, and only the two of us know the combination.
If anything happens to me, you get it to Dash.
Nobody else. Not through any official channel, not until we know Rourke's been dealt with.
" I hold her gaze. "I need you to memorize something, too.
The account numbers Dash pulled off the initial financial scan—three shell companies tied directly to Michaelson's personal signature, not just the company's.
If the drive gets destroyed, if I get taken out, you still know enough to burn him down. "
She repeats the numbers back to me twice, slow and careful, the same focus she probably brings to memorizing a recipe, until I'm satisfied they've locked into her memory the way they need to.
"And you're going to keep training," I say. "Every day, until this is over. Shooting, movement, the escape routes through the tree line. I'm not doing this without you knowing how to save your own life if I'm not standing next to you."
"Okay," she says, and there's no hesitation in it.
I pull her against me, feel her heartbeat pounding hard and fast under my palm, and for one long moment I let myself just hold her, memorizing the shape of her against my chest like it might be the last uninterrupted minute we get.
My phone buzzes again. I don't want to look at it. I look at it anyway.
Dash. Three words, nothing else.
Voss is moving.
I feel Willow go rigid against me, feeling the tension bleed into my body before I even say anything.
"What is it?" she whispers.
"Michaelson's mobilized his head of security." I set my jaw, already running the calculations—distance, timeline, how many hours until whoever's coming actually arrives. "The cabin isn't secure anymore. Not the way I thought it was."
She pulls back just enough to look up at me, and instead of the fear I expect, I see something colder and more determined settle into her face.
"Then we get ready," she says.
I look at her—flour-dusted, terrified, and steadier than half the agents I've worked with for twenty-five years—and something in my chest that's been braced for disaster since the moment I read that message finally exhales.
"Yeah," I say. "We get ready."
Outside, the light is starting to fail behind the tree line. Voss has gone dark—disappeared from every surveillance feed we have, pulled his team, and vanished into the kind of operational silence that means he's assembling something. Michaelson didn't mobilize him for a conversation.
He's coming for her. I just don't know when.
I am not letting him finish what he started on that embankment.